Intellectual Property Manifesto for the UK

feepcreature writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for a balance in Intellectual Property rights between the interests of users, creators and publishers. There are 6 key recommendations, including: DRM should not override users' statutory rights; analogue rights should apply to digital media; and copyright terms should not be extended without evidence that this would be good for society. There is also part of the debate on the UK Government's Gowers review of Intellectual Property, due to report in the Autumn."

Comments

Agree and disagree

[Dobeln]

Agree: "The life+70 years term is ludicrous. "To believe that anything beyond lifetime copyright impacts the incentive structure of creators takes some serious suspension of disbelief.

Disagree: "Going non-digital to digital changes nothing." It does - high-grade, repeated copying becomes a lot more easy and economical with digital media, often at near zero cost. This has two effects, pushing in different directions:

1. Immense possible benefit to consumers. You can get lots of high-quality stuff for almost nothing!

2. Immense possible harm to producers. If people are just copying your content free of charge, it's going to eat into your profits in most likely scenarios. In some scenarios, you might cease production entirely, or shift towards more difficult-to-copy formats.

Depending on your preferences, it's very likely that you will be wanting to rebalance copyright, one way or the other (more lenient, more strict), due to the adoption of digital media.

Re:Life + 70 years

[bersl2]

Somebody on Ars pointed out a post here on Slashdot that is, IMO, the most clear and succinct argument against life-plus copyright that I have ever seen, saying (in part):

I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law. And that's because the social contract has been trashed so thoroughly by the media industry that it's effectively invisible. Joe Average isn't stupid, but he's not an IP lawyer and given that he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it, the notion that copyright is a tradeoff of short-term disadvantage for long-term advantage never occurs to him, because as far as he knows it's just a permanent restriction. Ask Joe who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's works and he's likely to think it's a reasonable question.

(Emphasis mine.)

My views

[drsmithy]

Fundamentally, I believe copyright to be a concept that is broken by design, but that it has taken the "digital age", with its inherently instantaneous, free reproduction capabilities and near-instantaneous, near-free distribution channels to make that obvious.

With that said, I recognise that copyright is here to stay.

So, my guidelines for a fair copyright regime:

* Copyright is recognised as fundamentally an economic tool for artificially assigning value to something that inherently has none (ie: none of this flowery "for the betterment of society" claptrap).
* Copyright protection for economic purposes becomes an opt-in process (eg: if you want to sell a book or song, you have to register it as a copyrighted work).
* Length of copyright is linked to a works "ECD". When a work is registered as copyrighted, it must include an "Estimated Cost of Development". Once the owner of the copyright has recorded income from selling the copyrighted work that meets or exceeds the "ECD", the work is no longer subject to protection from non-profit copyright infringement (ie: filesharing and the like). Note that for-profit reproduction (ie: someone else *selling* a copyrighted work) is still a crime (and would be harshly punished).
* Fraudulent reporting of "ECD" or copyright-related income would be *severely* punished. Upon confirmation of such fraud, the work would immediately enter the public domain and a fine would be issued to the registered copyright holder equal to the submitted "ROI" value PLUS any reported income from the work. Where possible (ie: with proof of purchase), refunds would be issued to anyone who had purchased the work.
* On the death of the copyright holder, all their copyrighted works enter the public domain.

Re:My views

[Ngwenya]

Length of copyright is linked to a works "ECD". When a work is registered as copyrighted, it must include an "Estimated Cost of Development". Once the owner of the copyright has recorded income from selling the copyrighted work that meets or exceeds the "ECD", the work is no longer subject to protection from non-profit copyright infringement (ie: filesharing and the like). Note that for-profit reproduction (ie: someone else *selling* a copyrighted work) is still a crime (and would be harshly punished).

I sympathise with the goals, but think that the practice you're trying to implement would be extremely difficult. The unintended consequence of such a regime would (I think) be the artificial inflation of ECDs (notwithstanding your next point). Noone would have the appropriate incentive to report true costs - you'd need an extremely rigorous copyright equivalent of the SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley. Hell, Hollywood inflates its costs right now so that it can avoid paying percentage of profits to authors/screenplay writers/etc. I think having an ECD as the sole determinant of copyright duration would make this obscene situation much worse.

Fraudulent reporting of "ECD" or copyright-related income would be *severely* punished. Upon confirmation of such fraud, the work would immediately enter the public domain...

The problem here is determining what is a fraudulent assessment of a works costs. If everyone has an incentive to maximise their costs, then how does the appropriate copyright authority determine that they are all out of line - and by how much? You'd need some sort of state appointed copyright regulator (something like the Office of Communications [OfCom] in the UK). Regulators are generally employed, however, where there is, in effect, no free market in goods or services. Think of it as a sort of "surrogate market". You'd have a hard time saying that copyrighted works weren't in abundant supply.

I like the tone of your idea - that copyright is there to ensure you've got a chance of getting your costs back (NOT a guarantee) plus some reasonable profit for the venture (NOT some obscenely bloated ROI which guarantees you never have to work again). I think I'd simply advocate that one has an exploitation window of 10 years for free, and then an exponentially increasing copyright cost for keeping a work out of the public domain. After 25 years, a work enters the public domain, come what may. The incidence of works which only recover their costs after 25 years of distribution is vanishingly small. I have never understood the logic which says that works will not be attempted unless monopoly distribution rights extend 70 years past the death of the author. How many new works is Elvis producing these days?

--Ng